


Fix

by JMA



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:50:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JMA/pseuds/JMA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holly brought Dave back to keep me sane. I should have figured it out earlier. I can't stand by and watch him kill himself, Kryten. My take on what happened between 'Only the Good' and 'Back To Earth'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fix

_Holly brought Dave back to keep me sane. I should have figured it out earlier. I can't stand by and watch him kill himself, Kryten._

 

Kryten had been on suicide watch for three weeks since Kochanski left. Three weeks of waiting for this miserable wreck of a man to finish drinking himself to death. He would not abandon Mr Lister, no, but even he could see the writing on the wall. Sure, the past three weeks had...not helped, but Lister had given up on life long before.

 

_It's the guilt. From what happened on Red Dwarf. The first time it was Rimmer, but this time Lister feels like he's the one responsible._

 

Lister had roused himself into conciousness long enough for the _Wildfire_ to land. He'd even put on some clothes. Kryten could tell something was wrong from the moment Ace stepped out. He was too...young.

 

“Good to see you again, old chums,” Ace greeted, voice valiantly defying the disgust that his face couldn't quite hide. As much as Kryten cared for Mr Lister, he understood the feeling. He had tried his best to clean his friend up, but Lister still looked like something threw up all over the carpet.

 

“You're not him,” Lister slurred and passed out.

 

_I thought I could do it. I thought I could be for Lister what Dave was for me. I tried, Kryten, I really did. And I do care for him. That's why I can't sit by and watch this._

 

Ace was gone by the time Lister regained conciousness.

 

“How'd he die?” Lister asked, looking around for something to stop the pain. Everyone died, except him. Kryten placed something on the table in front of him. It was not the bottle of hooch he's been looking for.

 

“Saving some children from a burning ship. The _Titanic XI_ , in fact.”

 

Lister kept looking and the small, charred light bee in front of him. Why the hell was that here? Why wasn't it with the others, the other Ace's who died saving the universe from monsters and band men and idiots? Christ, he needed a drink!

 

Kryten looked uncomfortable. “The other Ace said it was his predecessor's last wish. Said his wanted to 'come home', sir.”

 

Lister found a bottle of medical alcohol.

 

_For the first time in my life, I regret not being Rimmer. I never thought I'd say that, but Lister needs Rimmer and he's dead. I can't be him and I can't bring him back._

 

“Well, if nothing else, you smell better. Whatchu got there?”

 

“Rimmer's light bee.”

 

“I thought Goalpost Head's disks were wiped.”

 

Lister looked up. Bits of Rimmer's light bee were spread out on the medilab table like a mechanical dissection. Lister's tools were lined up on the surgeons tray and a half dozen washers and bolts were sitting in a kidney dish. Lister lifted up the jeweller's eye piece he had taped over one eye.

 

“Yeah,” he said, scrubbing his right eye, “and without Holly we can't make another soft-light hologram anyway.” Lister poked the innards of the bee with his screwdriver. “But this is original Rimmer's hard light bee.”

 

“And I have every confidence that Mr Lister will have the light bee up and working in no time,” Kryten said brightly, bringing a tray of coffee into the room. He mentally congratulated himself on sounding convincing, thankful he no longer had to manually switch to 'lie mode'. Lister's hands were shaking as he picked up the cup. Even if the light bee was repairable, and this technology was well beyond the mechanical skill needed to repair your average chicken soup machine, it was obvious that the delicate work needed the kind of steady hand destroyed by extreme alcohol abuse.

 

But it didn't matter. Lister was only drinking himself unconcious in the evenings. He'd cleaned himself up to the extent that Cat was no longer avoiding not only Lister's general vicinity, but everywhere the man had been in the preceeding seventy-two hours. Sure, there were still patches of drunken weeping, but fixing Rimmer's light bee seemed to have given him something to live for.

 

Kryten helped. Even the Cat leant a hand after some bribery. It was slow going. For a week Rimmer's light bee would flicker on long enough for Rimmer, in full Ace get up but with a distinctly Rimmer expression, to yell, “Who put the smegging asteroid there!?” and then flicker off. With each adjustment he'd repeat the same message, reappearing in purple, then orange, and by Thursday a kind of iridescent green.

 

About a month after that they managed to get him to stay on, but it was a static image in black and white that seemed to accompanied by hold music.

 

Krytwn remained sceptical that they'd ever get Rimmer back up and running and Cat was largely disinterested in the project (“What's ya want him back for, anyway?), but neither of them could deny that Lister, who sometimes threw things in frustration, was more alive than he had been in a long time.

 

“It give me something to do. Takes me mind off things.”

 

When the hold music didn't stop, Kryten had to hide the light bee before Lister spaced it.

 

Lister stopped working in the medibay; instead he'd bring the whole project to wherever he happened to be, to tinker with or cajole someone else into tinkering with. Kryten accidentaly nearly threw out some of Rimmer when clearing out the microwave. After that Lister started putting the part in jars with labels like “Probably Rimmer's Spleen”

 

When Rimmer was six one of his brother's pranks had put him in a coma for nine weeks. He remembered waking, groggy, bleary and disorientated, to a lecture from his father on him being an inconvenience to the family and that Rimmer would be expected to pay his parents back for the medical expense. One of the small pleasures he has gotten from his death was that knowledge that the debt had never been totally repaid. This time, instead of being met by a tirade of insults and financial ruin, he woke to see a giant, chipmonk-cheeked gimboid grinning at him from close enough to smell the curry.

 

“If you start humming hold-music, or say anything about an asteroid, we're turning you back off.”

 

Rimmer couldn't remember anything about an asteriod, or hold music for that matter. He had no idea how he came to be lying on the kitchen bench. He remembered being dead. He remembered Red Dwarf, and living on Starbug, but things got a little woozy when he tried to remember what he was doing yesterday.

 

“Welcome back, Smeghead!”

 

Rimmer wasn't completely fixed. He couldn't remember being Ace at all and he would flick between hard and soft light with almost no warning. It took a while for him to consent to Lister taking another go at fiddling with his insides.

 

He wasn't completely fixed. Neither was Lister.

 

But it was a work in progress.

 

 


End file.
